The Trouble With Columbus

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Planned more than a century ago as a tribute to the landfall of Christopher Columbus in 1492, a five-story lighthouse now, finally, thrusts itself into the sky over Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. Aggressively supported by the nation's octogenarian President Joaquin Balaguer, the project will cost, when all the finishing touches are completed, about $20 million. It will also, when the switch is pulled, put on quite a show: 147 giant beams projecting a cross of light 3,000 ft. into the Caribbean night. The lighthouse comes equipped with its own power generators, which was a prudent idea on someone's part. The Dominican Republic's electricity system has virtually collapsed for lack of funding. Like the rest of the country, the neighborhoods surrounding this soaring beacon are routinely blacked out 20 hours a day.

The grandiose new lighthouse already looks like an anomaly, while the old poverty huddling at its edges seems all too contemporary. Overarching light and enforced darkness, cheek by jowl. The Manichaean contrast is altogether fitting for this, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' world-shattering voyage, which is itself increasingly seen in opposing terms of black and white. The Columbus quincentennial officially kicks off this Columbus Day, Oct. 12 -- but it has even now generated enough contrast and controversy to outlast its appointed year and, quite possibly, this decade.

At the heart of the hubbub lies a fundamental disagreement, not so much about Columbus himself as about the Columbian legacy. What, in other words, did the enigmatic Genoan set in motion when he first reached the New World? In one version of the story, Columbus and the Europeans who followed him brought civilization to two immense, sparsely populated continents, in the process fundamentally enriching and altering the Old World from which they had themselves come.

Among other things, Columbus' journey was the first step in a long process that eventually produced the United States of America, a daring experiment in democracy that in turn became a symbol and a haven of individual liberty for people throughout the world. But the revolution that began with his voyages was far greater than that. It altered science, geography, philosophy, agriculture, law, religion, ethics, government -- the sum, in other words, of what passed at the time as Western culture.

Increasingly, however, there is a counterchorus, an opposing rendition of the same events that deems Columbus' first footfall in the New World to be fatal to the world he invaded, and even to the rest of the globe. The indigenous peoples and their cultures were doomed by European arrogance, brutality and infectious diseases. Columbus' gift was slavery to those who greeted him; his arrival set in motion the ruthless destruction, continuing at this very moment, of the natural world he entered. Genocide, ecocide, exploitation -- even the notion of Columbus as a "discoverer" -- are deemed to be a form of Eurocentric theft of history from those who watched Columbus' ships drop anchor off their shores.

Not surprisingly, those who see Columbus' journey as a triumph of the human progress toward perfection and those who view the same event as a hemispheric rape do not have many kindly things to say to one another. But they are shouting a lot, and this clamor, so far, has defined the ceremonies to come.